Turnout Heavy in Philippines’ Crucial Election

Undaunted by widespread fears of fraud, violence and raids by armed rebels, millions of Filipinos today poured into 86,000 polling places throughout the nation in a special presidential election that ranks as the most crucial balloting in Philippine history.

The eight hours of voting, ending at 3 p.m. (11 p.m. Thursday PST), capped a bitter 57-day campaign that pitted President Ferdinand E. Marcos against an opponent, Corazon Aquino, whose almost total lack of political and leadership experience he has emphasized. She, in turn, has labeled Marcos “a dying dictator” and blamed him for the 1983 murder of her husband, opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr.

Within hours after the polls opened, long lines of voters had formed outside polling places in elementary and high schools throughout the country. The early turnout was unusually heavy, election officials said.

Free Bags of Rice

In Manila, whose 4 million votes represent the nation’s largest bloc, there were early reports of irregularities and hints of fraud. A salesman in the slum district of Tondo, who said he voted for Aquino “because of the poverty of the people,” said government trucks toured his neighborhood late Thursday night distributing free bags of rice and announcing that the rice “was a gift from President Marcos.”

He said he also received 30 pesos ($1.50) to vote for Marcos but did not do so.

Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of a U.S. presidential delegation sent to observe the voting, toured Tarlac and Pampanga provinces north of Manila this morning and encountered dozens of reports of what he called “administrative irregularities.”

Some missing ballots were reported, and there were allegations that some poll watchers were intimidated by pro-Marcos paramilitary troops and that soldiers were being transported in troop trucks from polling place to polling place, voting at each.

But Lugar said he did not believe that those problems would necessarily make the vote invalid. “The precincts we have seen lead me to believe that the will of the people will be fairly expressed in the balloting,” he said. “The problem may come in the count.”

At a polling center in the city’s market district of Quiapo, a young bank worker noted that few voters were willing to talk openly about how they cast their ballots. “People are afraid,” he said, giving his name only as Rick. “Even the dead vote in this place,” he added.

The ailing Marcos, 68, who has ruled this nation of 55 million for 20 years, called today’s special election 18 months before the official end of his term in an effort to prove to the nation and the world that he has a mandate to govern. His aim was to help end a national economic and political crisis triggered, in part, by Aquino’s killing.

Returns Due Tonight

The first unofficial returns in the contest are not expected until late tonight, but already it is clear that the election has captured the imaginations of tens of millions of Filipinos and crystallized their hopes for prosperity and peace in a nation where there is now little of either.

Impoverished squatters have slapped campaign stickers on their garbage carts and spent hours discussing Marcos’ campaign claim that Aquino is too naive and too close to the Communists to be president--one of the squatters’ leaders adding that he will vote for Marcos because “he has already stolen half the country. Why elect someone who might steal the other half?”

Angry, unemployed sugar cane workers, though, have endorsed Aquino and openly raged against Marcos, a shrewd leader who many of them believe is--as Aquino has portrayed him--a corrupt and evil “pharaoh” who has imprisoned his people and plundered their wealth.

Not since Marcos declared martial law in 1972 has the Philippine body politic been so keenly involved or acutely aware of the issues and implications of a national election.

Marcos himself has declared that the nation’s entire future is at stake in the election, which, in logistics alone, will cost the beleaguered Philippine government more than $10 million.

At a polling place today, his wife Imelda predicted that the election will bring “peace and fulfillment. After the behavior of the opposition in the last few days, I think the people will know what is good for them.”

The president’s personal stake is even greater: risking for the first time in more than a decade his place at the top of a singularly powerful political machine in return for a chance at six more years in office. That would be long enough, his advisers say, for Marcos to reform a government that many people now identify with corruption, violence and abuse, and to right any wrongs so as to leave a brighter legacy and secure a better place in Philippine history.

In his quest for victory, opposition leaders say, Marcos and his supporters have spent as much as $200 million in their lavish two-month campaign. Critics charge that the ruling party already has distributed millions of pesos in bribes to voters.

“I expect to win by a landslide,” Marcos predicted this week, adding that unscientific polls by his aides indicate that his margin of victory will be more than 2.5 million out of an expected 24 million votes cast.

Aquino Confident

But Aquino, too, has predicted a resounding victory for herself. Only massive cheating, vote-buying and armed intimidation by Marcos’ loyalists or the powerful military, she has said, could rob her of a chance to run the nation for the next six years.

Any Marcos victory, she said, could provoke mass violence on the streets. And, despite a widely held belief that Marcos would never hold an election he could lose, few analysts are willing to discount the possibility that Aquino could win.

As she emerged from her polling place today, she said, “Today is my day, and I’ve never been more confident of anything in my life as today.”

Aquino’s predictions are based not on pre-election surveys but something she calls “people power”--the massive, almost fanatical crowds that she drew as she criss-crossed the nation, delivering 432 speeches in 68 of the country’s 73 provinces, all in just two months.

The 53-year-old widow has relied little on the broken-down political machinery of her vice presidential running mate, longtime opposition leader Salvador (Doy) Laurel.

Instead, her populist campaign to return honesty, dignity, credibility and, thus, economic and political stability, to the government has been built on rural volunteer workers, donations from Manila’s rich business elite who have been alienated from Marcos’ rule, and behind-the-scenes support from the powerful and increasingly radical Philippine Catholic Church.

Contest of Good, Evil

The church, which represents more than 85% of all Filipinos, also views the election as an event of mammoth moral proportions--”a contest between good and the forces of evil,” according to the country’s chief prelate, Cardinal Jaime Sin.

Noting his own “fear and trembling” over reports that the election will be marked by fraud, the cardinal added this week that it is up to Marcos alone to choose “whether this election will herald the dawn of a new day, or whether the nation will continue to grope in the darkness of a long night.”

And that is the main issue for the Reagan Administration in Washington, which, as Marcos’ biggest single benefactor for military and economic aid, was subtly pressuring the president to hold the election until he announced it suddenly on American television last fall.

Officially, the U.S. government is not taking sides. If the election is seen by the Filipinos as being honest and credible, it will be a major step toward restoring democracy and revitalizing the economy, U.S. Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth has said repeatedly in recent weeks.

“In short, they will regard the government as their government,” Bosworth said last week, adding that such an election would help curb a burgeoning and bloody Communist insurgency, rekindle foreign and local investment in new job-producing industries and restore the confidence of international lenders, to whom the Philippines now owes about $25 billion.

Problems Will Remain

But Bosworth, and many other independent observers here, adds that, “Regardless of which candidate wins, the problems in this country, which I believe are being exploited by the insurgents, will remain, and these problems will have to be addressed seriously and urgently” after the election.

Perhaps it is because of the depth of those problems in the Philippine society--raging unemployment and inflation, lagging industrialization and rampant military and civilian corruption--that so many Filipinos have become so deeply involved in the campaigns of both candidates.

Even leaders of the radical left, which has been campaigning for a boycott of the election on the grounds that it cannot be fair or clean, concede that the overwhelming majority of the 26.1 million registered Filipino voters were going to the polls today.

It is primarily for that reason that Aquino and her supporters warn of mass protest and the possibility of violence if the Filipinos believe the election was fixed.

‘The Vote Is Sacred’

“To us,” one of Aquino’s close advisers said, “the vote is sacred. You Americans taught us that. But if Marcos steals this one from Cory, he will feel the wrath of the Filipinos.”

In light of such fears, more than 100,000 members of the Philippine armed forces have been deployed throughout the country just to oversee the election. And in Manila, where the worst of the street violence has occurred in the past, every soldier and policeman was placed on “red alert” status Thursday--on call 24 hours a day.

The predictions of violence, bolstered by Aquino’s pledge that she will personally lead mass protests in Manila and the rural provinces if she loses an election marred by fraud, have given rise to speculation that Marcos may declare martial law or be overthrown in a military coup if a Marcos victory triggers bloodshed.

That is among the “contingencies” under study for the past several weeks by a Jesuit think tank appointed by Cardinal Sin to project the impact of various possible results of the election.

Among the other possibilities are a Marcos victory without brazen cheating; an Aquino victory followed by government-instigated violence and a refusal by Marcos to step down, which he has pledged to do if he loses a fair contest; and an Aquino victory followed by a peaceful transition of power.

Cardinal Sin said the Jesuits will release their findings only after the election, and he said that will be the basis of the church’s reaction to the poll results.

But even the cardinal’s top aides concede that they fear that the least likely and least discussed possibility is the last one--an Aquino victory followed by her actual proclamation as president under an election machinery put in place entirely by Marcos.

Such an event, say Aquino’s own aides, is almost unimaginable in a nation that has lived under one man’s rule for so long.

“And yet, we hold onto that hope of a miracle,” said the cardinal’s aide, Felix Bautista. “And we pray.”